The cosmopolitan standard of civilization: a reflexive sociology of elite belonging among Indian diplomats
| Published date | 01 September 2023 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231170731 |
| Author | Kira Huju |
| Date | 01 September 2023 |
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https://doi.org/10.1177/13540661231170731
European Journal of
International Relations
2023, Vol. 29(3) 698 –722
© The Author(s) 2023
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DOI: 10.1177/13540661231170731
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The cosmopolitan standard
of civilization: a reflexive
sociology of elite belonging
among Indian diplomats
Kira Huju
London School of Economics and Political Science, UK
Introduction
A cosmopolite is a premature universalist, an imitator of superficial attainments of dominant
civilizations, an inhabitant of upper-caste milieus without real contact with the people.
—Indian freedom fighter and socialist leader Ram Manohar Lohia
This article sketches out the social rules for belonging among the ‘cosmopolitan elite’
at the geopolitical margins of international society. It does so by analysing an awk-
ward balancing act performed by career diplomats of the Indian Foreign Service
(IFS): even as Indian diplomats contest Western political hegemony and its attendant
ideologies, they perpetuate social behaviours that signal a desire to be recognized as
elite members of a Westernized diplomatic club, in whose hierarchies of race and
class they hope to ascend. Cosmopolitanism operates in this balancing act not as a
world-embracing ethic upholding an equal, pluralistic, or liberal international order
but as an elite aesthetic which presumes cultural compliance and social assimilation
into Westernized mores.
If it once was European powers who employed a colonial ‘standard of civilization’ to
legitimate their dominance over those whose social practices they judged inferior (Buzan,
2014), in a formally postcolonial order, Indian diplomats themselves have come to
employ elite performances of cosmopolitanism as a kind of civilizational standard. This
standard is continually enacted to secure one’s status as a worthy participant of a white,
Corresponding author:
Kira Huju, Department of International Relations, London School of Economics and Political Science,
Houghton Street, London WC2A 2AE, UK.
Email: K.Huju@lse.ac.uk
1170731EJT0010.1177/13540661231170731European Journal of International RelationsHuju
research-article2023
Article
Huju 699
historically upper-class, Westernized order in which some members are more equal than
others. It is used domestically by the Service’s elite against internal Others – lower-caste
or lower-class diplomats, rural recruits, vernacular speakers – who are classified as insuf-
ficiently worldly. Instead of transcending private loyalties, as Western political theory
presumes cosmopolitanism to do, this practice ties cosmopolitanism to a dominant posi-
tion in hierarchies of class, caste, and civilizational standing.
I adopt a critical sociological sensibility – this is an international society narrated not
through its high principles like non-interference or institutions like Bretton Woods, but
through quotidian practices, manners, and tastes. The analytical sensibilities of reflexive
sociology, inspired by Pierre Bourdieu, allow us to consider how social hierarchies dis-
cipline diplomatic performances. The Bourdieusian emphasis on habitus underscores
diplomacy’s embodied nature, locating forms of power and hierarchy in quotidian ges-
tures that would escape a diplomatic historian charting the contours of world-historical
developments. Bourdieu allows us to understand why conventions of international soci-
ety endure and how they are socially reproduced. Through gestures of distinction and
recognition, the rules of elite belonging among the cosmopolitan elite reflect structural
hierarchies of class, religion, race, gender and caste.
Out of these hierarchies emerges a pattern whose significance transcends India:
there is a disconnect between the ideals of cosmopolitan theory and the social behav-
iour of cosmopolitan elites. In the Western canon of political theory, cosmopolitanism
connotes an ethic of equality and tolerance, which mainstream theorizing has intui-
tively ‘understood to have a positive valence and progressive implications’ (Bender,
2017: 116). Cosmopolitanism ‘elaborates a concern with the equal moral status of each
and every human being and creates a bedrock of interest in what it is that human beings
have in common, independently of their particular familial, ethical, national and reli-
gious affiliations’ (Held, 2010: x). Diplomacy has contributed to globalizing these
ideals, since ‘all human beings are now participants in a single, global institutional
scheme – involving such institutions as the territorial state and a system of interna-
tional law and diplomacy’ (Pogge, 1992: 51). Approximating this theoretical ortho-
doxy, Indian diplomats, too, occasionally tie their cosmopolitanism to abstract ideals
like respect for the Other1 or articles of liberal faith like universal human rights.2
Yet ideal theory is not the primary modality in which Indian diplomats practise their
cosmopolitanism. In the diplomatic everyday, ‘cosmopolitanism’ is intuited to be a
domestic marker of distinction and status. Instead of embracing the world, it functions as
a social sieve. I examine who gets to be a cosmopolitan in the imageries of international
society that the IFS produces – that is, who is seen as inhabiting the correct cosmopolitan
habitus. This reading undermines some of the self-congratulatory rhetoric about the abil-
ity of liberal international order to accommodate difference (see, for example, Ikenberry,
2011): social rules perpetuate implicit hierarchies of recognition in a formally equal,
pluralistic order.
The article builds on 85 semi-structured interviews conducted mostly with former and
serving Indian diplomats, but also Union ministers, Bharatiya Janata Party and Congress
affiliates, and academics, as well as on archival research, used in this article mostly for
background, in the National Archives of India (NAI) and the Nehru Memorial Museum
and Library (NMML) in 2019.
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